Becky said, “Kris’s got the tattoos, the shaved head, the goatee. He shaves his head because he’s got curly-ass hair like Richard Simmons. I got profiled, too. As a kid, walking to school, I was the only white girl in the neighborhood, so the cops thought I must be messing around. They searched me and told me to put my head back. They’re looking at my eyes, asking, ‘Why are your eyes shading?’ I’d say, ‘Because I’m looking up into the sun.’ They’d search my whole bag and everything. Walking to school.”
I ask them about life near the border and their experience with migrants and smugglers. “We live on a group ranch a little set back from the border,” said Kris. “Our landlord has a few people on 160 acres, different houses, farm hands, stuff like that. It’s a big change from the city, living on grids, block by block. We have people tramping through the back yard, but it’s not as bad as out [farther east] where [Minutemen leader] Bob [Maupin] lives. When we first moved in, our neighbor told us, you ever see any Mexican comes through here, send him to my house. He helps the Mexicans out. He’s been living there thirty years. He’s not from here. He’s still got Baja, Mexico plates on his car. But his kids were born here and they go to the school. He raises roosters for cock fighting.
“Something has to be done. Sometimes, I [join Bob] and walk the border with my gun. It may be small, but we try to do our part. Bob’s been doing it a long time. His property faces south on the border. It’s right there. He’s had death threats. I’ll do what I can. Border Patrol agents are told it’s a catch-and-release thing now. Sometimes, even when it’s obvious, when we catch some dude on the border with a backpack and buckets of water—Border Patrol don’t respond to our calls. You’d think they might want to check this guy. What if this dude is a murderer, on his way to commit a crime? I know not everybody jumping is a murderer. But what if?”
Becky doesn’t want me to get the wrong idea. “We’re not against immigrants,” she said. “America was built on the backs of immigrants. Nobody except the natives are from here. But we’re in serious trouble. We can’t keep taking everybody. How can we help anybody when we’re $19 trillion in debt? I’m talking about foreign aid as well. The more people who come here, who aren’t from here, who don’t assimilate, you lose the country. The only reason they’re here is for money. They don’t want to be Americans. There’s no national pride. When people don’t care about the country, how can we make it better?”
Kris suggested the nation’s days as a melting pot are over, or at least deserving of a new scrutiny, something you hear often talking to Trump supporters. It’s a position that can rest uneasily and immediately alongside an appreciation of one’s own immigrant roots.
“Obviously, let’s not make it too hard,” he said. “I want people to come in. This is a country of immigrants. But we’re a little bit past that. Yeah, we need to shut the door slightly, stem the flow a little bit. Let’s get people in here that want to work. Let’s get people in here that’s going to have pride for the country. You know, like citizenship classes. Let’s figure out what makes this country great. I want you to understand, if you’re coming into my country, what makes this country great. The freedoms you’re entitled to, the things you’re entitled to. Bring your history all you want, but understand that this is my country, and the path to citizenship should require that. If they’re criminals, they shouldn’t be here. If they have a criminal record, they shouldn’t be here. You know what they do in Mexico when those motherfuckers jump the fence? They shoot them. I’m not saying that we shoot them, but you really want to talk shit on our border policies? Amnesty, ‘safe cities’, shouldn’t be offered. Illegal alien means illegal alien, whether they’re from Mexico or Canada. The Middle East. Can’t let those guys in either. That scares the hell out of me. You don’t know where they’re from. They got kids over there blowing themselves up. Women that are blowing themselves up. You just don’t know. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there’s some shit going down.
“I get it. There’s a lot going on in Mexico and the [Central American] countries. But you come over here, don’t be like, ‘Mexico! Mexico! Mexico!’ Why don’t you go back to Mexico and make Mexico great? Don’t bring a shithole over here. Come on. I’m not going to Europe, like, ‘You guys are doing it wrong, you need to have a bunch of guns over here.’ That’s how they do shit there. We don’t really have an idea on how to fix the problem, but there is a problem. Let people come over the right way. Our friend Joe’s wife is native from Mexico.”
“She’s Venezuelan,” said Becky.
“Whatever. Wherever she’s from. She went through the proper channels to get her citizenship. It was right around that time that Obama did that amnesty. [In 2014, Obama bestowed temporary legal status and work permits on five million undocumented immigrants.] She was so mad. She was, like, ‘I went through so much stuff. I went through classes. I paid thousands. It took me forever to get it, and I finally got it.’ It was just a smack in the face for the people that are actually trying to do it the proper way.”
When I first met Kris and Becky a few days earlier, they had mentioned plans to join some friends and hold Trump signs opposite the entrance of a Bernie Sanders rally in San Diego, heckling attendees the way protestors do at Trump rallies. I ask Kris what happened.
“I was gonna go, but my tooth is killing me. I didn’t get no sleep last night. I don’t want to go to a rally and be the guy that fights everybody. The attitude I have right now, I’ll go down there and fight. What I really want to do is smack people upside the head with blunt force knowledge. I want to tell them, ‘There’s not enough money.’ Bernie keeps saying, ‘Free Free Free.’ But where this money’s coming from? The stuff he says about free trade? I’m down, man. I just can’t handle a socialist. You can’t keep giving it away. What’s a college education if it’s free? It ain’t worth shit. Kids, back in the days, they used to work hard, they used to do things to get ahead. Mow the lawn. Our son is sixteen, has two jobs. He works here and he works at the feed store because he likes animals. That sense, it’s not there anymore. It’s frustrating.
“Trump is waking up the grass roots, the people that haven’t voted. They’re like, ‘Fuck, you took our jobs!’ Everybody’s getting pushed out. The production jobs are gone. Now coal’s under fire. You can’t keep getting rid of jobs and bringing people in. There’s this dilution of American pride. All the fundamental rules that America was established on, like ‘One Nation Under God’, you don’t have that anymore.”
“This is coming from a guy with a few pentagrams on his body,” interjected Becky. “We are in no way, shape, or form religious.”
“I don’t care if you’re gay, or any of that stuff,” Kris continued. “I don’t care if you’re black, brown, yellow. I don’t give a fuck. Just make your own money. Make money so that the government can get richer off of collecting taxes. The government handouts are tidbits of money, enough to keep them in that loop, but it almost forces people to do illegal things to supplement. They can’t get a job, because they’ll lose the benefits. So maybe they sell drugs to get what that they need.
“I’m the perfect example of coming from nothing. Moved up here with some clothes. I didn’t ask anybody for help. Nobody gave me any help. I didn’t take it from the government. I didn’t ask for food stamps. I didn’t ask for any assistance. I just did. Because there was no other way. People have that power within them.”
* * *
From Alpine, I drove southeast down to Old Highway 80, a two-lane road that tracks the border and was for decades the only artery between San Diego and Georgia. In the early decades of the last century, the 80 incubated a string of thriving towns that fed off the railroad and early automobile traffic. Constant flooding caused the railroad to be relocated north in the 1920s. When the I-8 freeway was completed in the early 1970s, the Greyhounds stopped coming through, and the towns along the old 80 collapsed. All that’s left along the borderlands of east San Diego County is a few VFW bars, two-star motels built
on hot springs, and sleepy general stores. The bulletin boards outside these general stores all feature the same handful of fliers: a monthly barn dance, a new Mountain Women meet-up, a ranch hand offering work for living quarters, a missing man last seen in Slab City, a desert squatter’s community in neighboring Imperial County.
The political spine of Old Highway 80 bends conservative, reflecting a population of ranchers like Bob Maupin, aging veterans, and part-timers and retirees from San Diego and Orange Counties. Most residents live within sight if not spitting distance of the fence that runs along most of the 187 miles of California-Mexico border. The fence was built by the second George W. Bush administration under growing pressure from Congress, where Republicans found themselves targeted by a grassroots movement that contained more than a drop of Orange County blood. Construction of the twenty-one-foot steel fence began with the signing of the 2006 Secure Fence Act. It replaced the rusted triple-wire fence that had defined the US-Mexico border for as long as anybody alive could remember. The Bush fence was taller than the old fence, but remained more political gesture than physical barrier: easily scaled, full of holes, and mute on the subject of proliferating cross-border tunnels.
Trump supporters on California’s border scoff at Bush’s Maginot Line in the sand. But this doesn’t mean they think any more of Trump’s promised Wall—the “big, beautiful wall” that is the central symbol of his “America First” campaign. The people here take the Wall as a metaphor. They assume his advisors will educate him on what they see as self-evident truth: to staunch cross-border traffic, the solution required is basic, the determining factor not tons of concrete and steel, but boots on the ground, backed by executive will.
“We don’t need more wall,” said Stuart Mills, a forty-eight-year old Trump supporter with a shaggy head of blonde-gray hair who owns twenty-four acres of land on Tierra del Sol Road, just off Old Highway 80. “In Europe, they have border roads. Every 100 yards, there’s a guard station with machine guns, walkie-talkies, and a port-o-potty. The truck drops you and your partner off. You sit and watch. It’s effective. You ain’t getting across that border.”
I met Mills on his property while walking the dirt roads of Boulevard, a remote and dispersed border community of three hundred souls. A contractor with a local utility company, Mills bought the land as a borderland getaway in 1997. He lives in San Diego and spends weekends and holidays here with his teenage son. Mills is a close student of border politics and its history. He is likely among the few Trump voters in the country whose friends include both Mexican smugglers as well as Border Patrol brass.
“I know a guy that smuggles people,” Mills told me as he handed me a Budweiser. We were sitting on rocks overlooking the Bush fence and the mountains of Baja beyond. You could see clear for miles.
“I work with him on power lines. His family is old mafia from Mexicali. He’s proud of it. He tells me everything, the routes, the schemes. He tells me straight up, ‘You guys in the United States don’t get it. You are brought up to work and earn, but you don’t know what it’s like in these countries. There is no money.’”
He pointed at the fence, tiny down below. “They just come right through here,” he said. “They just use ladders, or dig under it.” Then he pointed into the distance at the mountains of Baja. Nestled into one of these mountains, several miles away in Mexican territory, was a complex of some sort. “That’s a prison,” he said. “Border Patrol has telescopes that can see what’s going on inside the prison yard. They see prisoners get executed. They stand them out there, and Boom. Firing squad. It’s Mexico justice. My smuggler friend was in that prison for almost two months. His dad was able to buy him out.”
I asked him if it’s difficult balancing friendships with smugglers and support for Donald Trump. “Yeah it is,” he said. “He’s been caught, he’s on the list, he’s done prison time. You know.”
We drank in silence for a minute before Mills tried to explain the ethical foundations of his border politics. “What a lot of people don’t know is that illegals are modern-day slaves. Most come from El Salvador, Guatemala. They get the shit pounded out of them all the way through Mexico. How do they have $10,000 to get across? The traffickers work them to pay it off. Once they work the shit out of you for a year, year and a half, you’re free. Fieldwork, roofing, digging ditches. There are ‘stash houses’ all through to El Centro [in California’s Imperial County] with up to a hundred people sleeping on cots, pooping in one bathroom. Once that debt is paid off, they’ll go get his brother or cousin, bring him across. Now he owes $10,000… .”
I ask Mills if he’s witnessed much violence. “I heard a girl getting raped in the back part of my property one night. Screaming bloody murder. I took my gun and went looking. All of the sudden I don’t hear anything. It’s pitch black out here. I don’t know if there are thirty of them, or what. Sometimes I see them dump the migrant [groups] out on the road. A van pulls up, kicks them out. There’s seven of them, but the pick-up car has room for three. They fight trying to get in the car. The four losers start running around, they don’t know where to go. Once they’re here, they want to get to LA, not hang in San Diego.
“I’ll tell you a story. About eighteen years ago, I was down there at the lake with my son’s mother and a friend.” He points beyond view into the hills below us. “She was sunbathing nude. My buddy had just bought a Thompson .45 caliber [fully automatic machine gun] and we were shooting. Out of nowhere comes this piece of shit Toyota Corolla through the bushes. No road or anything. These guys get out, and go, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ I go, ‘Fuck, I didn’t think there was a road back here.’ He goes, ‘Aw, nah, there’s no road. We make our own road.’ These were big, scary dudes. Out by the lake, there’s nobody. One of them looks over at my girlfriend, and goes, ‘You mind if we take turns on her?’ My buddy Dave goes, ‘Aw, you don’t want to do that … ’ and he pulls his Thompson. They go, ‘Oh, okay, you got one of those.’ They pop their trunk and point two TEC-9s at us. I go, ‘Oh, fuck, you don’t want her, she ain’t going to be into that. She scratches and shit.’ I try to change the subject, and ask what they’re doing. He goes, ‘Oh, we’re bringing some pot across. This corridor here belongs to me and my family.’ We’ve been using it for thirty years.’ I said, ‘Well, how do you get across the border check down at Buckman Springs?’ He goes, ‘We pay people. Do you want to do a drop for us at Ocean Beach?’ By that time, my girlfriend was putting her clothes on. I’m giving her looks, like, ‘We got to go.’ I’m looking around for anybody. There’s nobody around. True story. That was under Clinton.
“Back then, we saw Border Patrol every couple of days. One agent for the entire area. Under Bush, we started getting a lot more Border Patrol. At first, they weren’t welcome. They were a bunch of yahoos, driving their 4X4s through our fences and shit. People started putting spikes in their driveways, but that didn’t work because they were going, ‘These are government vehicles. Pop our tires, we don’t give a shit [laughs].’ Yeah, there was a bunch of dicks in Border Patrol, guys that couldn’t be cops and now they’re federal, getting into bar fights. These days it’s a more professional element.
“When I first got here in ’97, this abandoned town was the Wild West, drugs coming into the house through the tunnels, trafficking all over the place. What happened was—you see down where the [abandoned] railroad signs and the crossings are? The train would stop right there. In the old days, this was called ‘High Pass.’ It was a real flowing town. Jacumba, Boulevard, Campo, they were vacation places for everybody in Palm Springs and Imperial County. They’d come up here for the summer to get out of the heat. You can see old pictures of Jacumba with hundreds of Model Ts. When they invented air conditioning, people stopped coming. The smugglers turned the town into a haven, the houses, the old school building, they were pickup places. They all burned down five years ago in a fire. The Indians over at the [Campo] reservation got a hold of some military tracer rounds. Shot one into a bush. The winds picked
up and houses burned all the way to Jacumba. My neighbor died watching a Chargers game asleep on the couch. What are you going to do? I don’t go over to the reservation. I heard you get your ass kicked [laughs].”
I ask about corruption in the Border Patrol. “Everybody I know that brings drugs across the border says, ‘You just pay the Border Patrol.’ There’s a bunch of corrupt Border Patrol, on both sides. But most want to do their jobs and love their country. It’s a dangerous job. We’ve had a couple field agents killed.
“But there’s a lot of ways to get drugs across besides bribes and tunnels. Listen to this—it’s pretty clever. You know those little kids with squirt bottles washing car windows while you wait on the Mexican side of the checkpoint? Smugglers hand these kids a buck and say, ‘Use these squirt bottles.’ These bottles have [marijuana] shake in the water. The kids start squirting the car ahead of you. This sets the dogs off, there’s never more than a few dogs. Now all the agents are over there, tearing that car apart, as you just go through. You get a lot of this at the Mexicali checkpoint near El Centro. It’s near a back way to L.A. through Palm Springs. There’s a lot of clever techniques. Drug money transferred through Mexican Walmarts. You buy gift cards for x amount of dollars and somebody down there buys things and returns them. Pretty clever.
“We’re frustrated. We’re not anti-Mexican. If you’re here, if you see the grief that they go through. If people heard rapes in their back property, no one around to do anything, you know? It doesn’t have to be this way. The farms used to pick up workers every morning at El Centro. They came to the border, stood in line, and the lettuce guy said, ‘I need sixty people for about two weeks.’ You signed in, got a badge, picked lettuce for two weeks, got paid, went back to Mexico, then back in line again. Everybody was accounted for. Everybody got what they needed. That system worked. Now, you sneak in and you can’t get back out. When they did away with all of that, it created this whole fuckin’ hiding-in-the-shadows situation. Border Patrol can’t go to Home Depot and say, ‘Hey, you guys got your papers?’ Now they’re all fuckin’ cocky: ‘You can’t question me.’ And we get repeat people coming back from prison.
The Gilded Rage Page 11